Abell Cluster by an amateur

Images of clusters (of Galaxies) always interest me, I’m not entirely sure why though I think it must be something to do with seeing the grand structure / amazing size that the Universe has. I just sit back and go “woah” thats amazing most of the time, on occasion I have got to do some research on this subject matter, in fact I presented a poster at the [National Astronomy Meeting 2006] on this work. I will have to put the whole poster online at some point, but for now you can read my abstract [here], see entry N.16 An SDSS study – Are brightest cluster galaxies special?. I think the topic is quite amazing. Anyway back to the topic of this post and why I am going on about galaxy clusters, oh so you know a cluster of galaxies is essentially a big bunch (quite a lot) held together by one large central gravitational point. They are formed of groups, our own consists of us (the Milky Way), Andromeda and various smaller ones. Anyway they are really quite massive and big (which is a bit of an understatement). For a much better introduction to them take a look at [UoB ASR Group Pages] and [Chandra Pages]. Oh and the whole reason I mentioned any of this was because I cam across a cool pic taken by an amateur astronomer with a pretty cool setup (no 1metre telescopes here! 🙂 ), take a look: [arnholm.org]